Thorsten Leemhuis (acct. 1/4)Remember the #Hercules monochrome ISA graphics adapter?
I had one in the first PC I used – about ~37 years ago.
The driver for it was now removed from #Linux for Version 7.2: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/37a91b995952a556a6eb90c31736ee773b86999c
Frottier@kernellogger My school back in the 90ies had a bunch of – then outdated – Commodore PC 10 machines. Those had Hercules graphics and amber monochrome screens. I remember the weird resolution, painting lines, circles etc with Borland Pascal.
@dasfrottier I think a lot of schools in Germany (and maybe elsewhere, too) had that setup back then, as mine had something like that, too (iirc)
nick@kernellogger Damnit that was my dream setup for a while there, you could do cool graphics mode shit on the main VGA card and still read the debugging output on the HGA.
(I don't quite remember how that worked now but anyway, that's why people loved them)
@kernellogger thinking about it, this may have been in DJGPP though.
christian mock@nickzoic @kernellogger it worked because the video RAM was mapped at different addresses. Such a dual-screen setup was also used for AutoCAD, with a 19" monitor with some special graphics card (that could only do graphics) for CAD and the hercules for DOS and the AutoCAD CLI...
@cm @kernellogger oh that's right, whereas you couldnt have two VGA cards because they'd be at the same physical address.
The Apple 2 is still about the only computer that got this right.
The Apple 2 is still about the only computer that got this right.
@nickzoic @kernellogger ISTR there were VGA cards that could be jumpered (remember those?) to a different framebuffer address (and probably a different BIOS address, too), but I don't think I ever did that...
Natanael Copa@kernellogger I do remember this because it was also in my first computer! #Hercules monochrome was my first meet with programming graphics. was address 0xb000 or something.
Simon ZerafaEven odder was the colour version of the Hercules standard. Quite rare but there were some around.
M Schommer 🏳️🌈@kernellogger
Noooooo!1! Noooo, they can't do THAT! That's a sacrilege! What will they slaughter next? OMTI controllers for ESDI disks?!
Noooooo!1! Noooo, they can't do THAT! That's a sacrilege! What will they slaughter next? OMTI controllers for ESDI disks?!
@musevg 😂
Which reminds me:
I recently wondered if Linux might still have Cdrom/DVD and ISO 9660 support in 2050 for booting/provisioning VMs. 🤔
Similar to how floppy disks icons are still on buttons for saving files…
Arnd Bergmann@kernellogger mdafb is also gone now, this was the other way you could use the same hardware in text mode. I think there is still some code in the fbcon driver to support simultaneous VGA and hercules consoles (either text or graphics mode), which was possible at the time because mda/herc had non-overlapping ISA bus ranges.
There is so much complexity around weird corner cases between the tty/vt/fbcon/fbcore/drm layers of the stack that should get cleaned up at some point.
Marcin Juszkiewicz 🙃@arnd @kernellogger MDA and Hercules had memory at B000:0000.
VGA used 64KB memory window at A000:0000.
This allowed to use both cards at the same time. Turbo C/Pascal allowed to run debugger on Hercules to debug app running on VGA.
Dual head of the early 90s.
Zygmunt Krynicki
Andrew@kernellogger 30 years ago I took home from a previous work place an old Hercules card and the matching paper white 19" screen. I never got around to using them, and Dad took them to recycled 9 years ago...
Jyrgen N@kernellogger @cm Is the MDA driver still in?
@jyrgenn @cm no, that one is now done, too:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/e38b27199e0f5b530fd2b033e3b63241a0b16596
@kernellogger @cm Bummer. I wrote a driver for the PC text mode once (for something entirely different), and it is so trivial! 4 KB video RAM, 1 byte for the character, 1 byte for the attributes for 80 characters in 25 lines.